Summertimes

Oh I have been terrible with keeping up with my blog. This is not to say that I haven't been baking up a storm though. In fact, due to certain factors I didn't seek out summer employment so I find myself baking anything that pops into my head. It's really quite amazing because this is the first summer since I was 15 that I'm not working and the first summer since before I can remember that I'm not at least in some type of summer school.

In an attempt to get out of the house and get in some practice before culinary school my mother suggested I take a cake decorating class. Simple enough, I went to Michael's to check it out and Tuesday I had my first class.

While the first 30-40 minutes of the two hour class seemed like a pitch to see all of the wonderful Wilton products we could buy the rest of the class was pretty fun. I have to admit that I'm tickled pink over the idea that I will be given a certificate at the end of the class, I'm contemplating signing up for the next class which will deal with gum paste flowers.

Since it was the first class we didn't take on anything very difficult, we practiced stars and pressure control when dealing with frosting bags. May I just say that disposable frosting bags are the best thing in the world. I admit cleaning up is probably the one thing about baking that I don't dig so if I can just take off the coupler and tip and throw the bag out I'm a pretty camper. There's just something about getting the left over frosting wet that makes me squeamish.

I digress, I basically ended up just decorating cookies with plain white frosting:

Next week we are actually working with cakes and before hand I'll be needing to bake and crumb coat my own cake. I'm thinking a vanilla cake with Root beer buttercream filling. Yum.